


That Stubborn Light

by LookingForDroids



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, SGRUB (Homestuck), Soulmarks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22591243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Marsti has little love for SGRUB and its bitter ironies, but her Aspect isn’t only bleak, and not all bonds are shackles.
Relationships: Folykl Darane/Marsti Houtek
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	That Stubborn Light

The Land of Stone and Void is not an easy place to navigate, and not a pleasant place to stay. It’s cold and sparse, a land of dark waters lapping against desert shores. The sky is the unbroken black of a night stripped of stars, and the unceasing wind has worn the red rock islands and ruins into weird organic shapes. Marsti shivers beneath her coat, wondering if the girl whose makeshift hive was transported here feels like this all the time.

The junkyard is familiar, at least, and even the grime and rusting scrap is comforting when what she knows about the world has all changed without warning. Even her body has been altered; there’s a mark on her palm, beneath her glove, branded there like a scar. It prickles when she thinks about it, so she’s been trying to think about anything else instead. But this game has rules, just like everything, and the one she figured out fastest is that when the Seer tells you something matters, you listen. What Folykl is telling her now is that the sigils have meaning. 

“OK,” she says. “Great. But what are we supposed to take from that?”

 _Aside from the fact that I’m a Maid even here,_ she thinks, quietly furious. She knows it’s meant to evoke something different, old-time royalty languishing in towers or cheery lowblood farmtrolls or what the fuck ever, but it still feels like a slap in the face to realize that even the end of the world can’t jar her out of the future she’d been given.

“That this shitty game has a sense of humor,” Folykl says. “You know Kuprum is the Knight of Hope? He’s got a pair of wings. Right over his spine, where they put the fucking port in.”

She folds her arms around her knees and rests her chin on her crossed wrists, scowling at the red dust beneath her sneakers. There’s an alchemized battery pack strapped to her back, but Marsti knows it scares her, being apart from her moirail for too long, and she’s beginning to suspect that it’s as much for his sake as her own. There is very little about Kuprum that Marsti finds endearing, but horrorterrors help her – much help as they ever are to anyone – she thinks she’s starting to feel sorry him herself.

Platonically. Platonically sorry for. But jegus, the Empire did a number on that poor kid’s pan.

“What’s yours?” she asks, angling for a distraction, not sure whether it’s meant for Folykl or herself.

“You get three guesses.”

Folykl rolls up her sleeve, revealing the sigil halfway up her forearm: a circle of short dark lines tilted inwards, towards an emptiness at the center. Looking at it, Marsti feels a chill of recognition, a brief pulse and pressure in her palm where her own mark rests. It isn’t quite pain. It’s barely even sensation, so much as just... awareness. The knowledge that something has impressed itself on her skin, whether she wants it there or not.

“Same as mine,” she says.

“Void,” Folykl says, with a derisive laugh. “Lucky you.”

 _Fuck,_ Marsti thinks. Speaking of slaps to the face. Maybe this game _is_ a joker, and not a kind one.

“If it’s both of us,” she says, “then there’s got to be more to it than some facile reference to your condition.” 

Folykl nods, suddenly distant, her attention pulled away by something else. She tilts her head like she’s trying to listen to something she can hardly hear. There is the sound of waves on stone, and wind through the hollows of rock formations, and nothing else, but whatever it is that she’s trying to catch, she must catch it.

“I’ll tell you what they mean,” she says. “We can’t run away from ourselves. If we do, we’ll lose. We really don’t want to lose.”

It sounds like she’s speaking from far away, and beneath the bitterness, her voice carries the echo of a Seer’s truth.

“Well,” Marsti says. “I’m not running.”

She pulls off her glove, and flexes her fingers in the biting cold. She isn’t used to going around with bare skin, undefended, and there’s a danger in touching anyone; at least with Folykl, you know up front what it might cost you. She holds out her hand, offering a little of herself, and Folykl reaches out to take it. Her palm is soft and dry, her claws sharp, her skin smudged with red dust that Marsti wants to scrub clean. This place has settled on her. On both of them, really. They walk to the junkyard’s boundary together, and Marsti thinks about hope and absence and what it might mean to belong to a person or a place or a destiny. Maybe there’s still room, between the rules of the game, to choose what they might become. 

When they reach the shoreline, she looks down over the edge and feels her breath catch, and her grip on Folykl’s hand tightens in surprise and wonder.

The sky is empty, but there are stars beneath the water.

**Author's Note:**

> Brought to you by the realization that my Friendsim OTP are both Void players.


End file.
